December 3, 2009

Addendum to "The Party of Mandatory Assent"

What weaves all these threads together is a common theme of "winning" debate -- legislative, administrative, judicial, and academic -- by gagging the opposition, by mandating assent, by locking out dissenters, and by throwing freedom of speech under the bus of the permanent campaign.

Bearing that in mind, here's another datum; this comes from the post "Free speech for me - not for thee," by Mark J. Fitzgibbons; I think you'll see the relevance:

I recently received a direct mail fundraising appeal from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) that contained a premium (direct mail term for ‘freebie'). The letter was signed by Senator John Kerry. The premium was a flexible magnet, the type people put on their refrigerators and such.

The magnet read: STAND FOR CHANGE -- SILENCE GOP LIES

Silence them? Does the fundraising appeal also include a free SEIU t-shirt and standard-issue truncheon?

Submitted for your thoughtful consideration...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 3, 2009, at the time of 10:09 PM

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Comments

The following hissed in response by: George Mikos

This post and the preceding one are good trys, but they fail to make their case for the same reasons that dozens of similar articles (ie, what distinguishes Dems from Repubs, lefties from righties, etc) fail: (1) Actual differences are statistical, not ideological; & (2) Other differences exist, some of which may be more meaningful.

As a counterpoint, I posit that the major (statistically-framed) difference between the left and right is that the right embraces reality and facts while the left doesn't. To make this case, however, is not within the province of this post. Again,

The above hissed in response by: George Mikos at December 4, 2009 12:46 PM

The following hissed in response by: Penny Dreadful

"You keep using these words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean."

The operative term here is "lies." When one side lies (i.e., lying about "death panels," accusing the president of lying during a speech, claiming he wasn't born in the US), then you don't have a debate. Perhaps, if conservatives are truly upset, they should rely on reason and facts, not lies that can be very easily debunked. Lies should be countered. In fact, it serves conservatives well to counter the lies that their ideological allies keep spewing, as it reflects poorly on them.

I was really hoping that conservatives would do some much-needed soul-searching. If you want to be taken seriously in the public discourse, please stop with the histrionics about being "shouted down," especially after you guys spent years screaming about unpatriotic, treasonous liberals. In fact, I believe Bill O'Reilly built his career on yelling "Shut up!" Your fellow right wingers are notorious for shouting people down.

Nobody is trying to put you out of business or send you to prison camps. That much-feared "Fairness Doctrine" has not been reinstated. You are not being censored by the government. Stop whining.

When one side lies (i.e., lying about "death panels," accusing the president of lying during a speech, claiming he wasn't born in the US), then you don't have a debate.

In reverse order...

Have you seen any post on this blog claiming Barack H. Obama was not born in the United States?

When the president said, If you are happy with the insurance plan you have, you can keep it -- when he knew full well that a great many employers would find it cheaper and easier (because it was designed to be) to dump their private health-care coverage, forcing all their employees onto the government option... was that a lie? If not, why not?

Why isn't the MedPAC -- the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission -- a "death panel?" It has the power to decide which medical procedures Medicare recipients will receive, thus the power of life and death over them.

In Great Britain, which boasts a single-payer National Health Service very like what liberals want to impose here, thousands of patients a year are denied medical care, either by direct decision or by endless "waitlisting;" during that delay, many of them die from their diseases or conditions.

Sounds like a "death panel" to me; why doesn't such terminal authority make MedPAC a "death panel?"

You caricature me as ranting hysterically; I contend my posts are calm, measured, evidenced, and logical. Can you point to a counterexample?

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